Manoel de Oliveira’s Acto da Primavera (Rite of Spring) marks the beginning of Portuguese modern cinema, establishing Oliveira as the most important reference for a new generation of filmmakers, both in Portugal and abroad. Presented as a documentary about a medieval Passion play performed in rural Portugal, the film was nothing like the average state-supported documentaries about Portuguese peasant folklore. The modernity of Oliveira’s cinema could be synthesized in the obligation, both aesthetic and ethic, to always shoot not “the artifice of reality, but the reality of the artifice”, to use the expression of Portuguese film historian Luis de Pina. This is why Acto da Primavera’s structure continuously addresses the dual role of the actors as, on the one hand, the characters in a medieval play and, on the other, the inhabitants of a 1960s Portuguese rural village. Furthermore, it is the respect for everything that is artificial in cinema that allows the medieval performance to open itself to the modern world – through the use of archival footage of a nuclear present to portray Christ’s visit to Hell, and through the spring rebirth of the agricultural fields that, in the final sequence, is made to correspond to Christ’s Resurrection and, thus, to the renewal of all things. In 1989 an intermediate master and a dupe negative were produced from the original camera negative; the resulting prints were unsatisfactory because of the noticeable loss of resolution and colour saturation. In 2008, the laboratory at ANIM – Cinemateca Portuguesa produced new preservation elements: colour separation contact matrices were printed and recombined into a dupe negative. The final print convinced us about the legitimacy of this neglected photo-chemical technique.

Tiago Baptisa and Luigi Pintarelli, Cinemateca Portuguesa

The first thing I did was to shorten the text, which could be divided into two parts: one primarily of action, and the other of atmosphere, where the Old Testament is remembered and the Bible is told. (…) I cut out the entire atmosphere part, leaving only the action one. I never thought I would shoot the representation of the Passion in its entire length. I initially intended to create a documentary, but several cameras would have been needed to film it all in a single day. Then I understood it would be better to chat with the actors and to attempt the full-length representation. By this I mean not filming the ‘Passion’, but staging a representation specifically for the filming… (…) The resulting play evokes practically the entire Bible story, from the Old Testament through the end of the New. It is a 16th century ‘Act’ of Father Francisco Vaz de Guimarães, with an Ritrovati & Restaurati / Recovered & Restored 33 educational and doctrinal aim. (…) I also wanted to show that the representation was of an event taking place two thousand years earlier, one rewritten in the 16th century and reworked in the 20th century with cameras and microphones. I wanted to film the cameras shooting and the recorders in action, etc. And so we have Christ’s era, the 16th century and the 20th century. All at the same time, and simultaneously visible. Only the cinema can render this trick. This is its charm. (…) I thought I’d be able to make the two films [A Caça and Acto da Primavera] at the same time. If it rained I would shoot one, and if the sun shone, the other. (…) But I soon realized that it would be impossible: I was concentrating so much on one film that I couldn’t make another one. This is why (…) I immediately dropped A Caça to focus exclusively on Acto da Primavera. Only when the filming was finished on this one did I resume shooting A Caça. And so I made Acto thinking only about Acto, and A Caça thinking only about A Caça.

Manoel de Oliveira, Il cinema: al di là del sipario nero, edited by João Bénard da Costa, in Manoel de Oliveira, edited by Simona Fina and Roberto Turigliatto, Turin Film Festival, Turin 2000